History
In 1900, when the U.S. population was 76 million, there were 66.8 million Whites in the United States, representing 88% of the total population, 8.8 million Blacks, with about 90% of them still living in Southern states, and slightly more than 500,000 Hispanics.
Under the current law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the number of first-generation immigrants living in the United States has quadrupled, from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007. During the 1950s, 250,000 legal immigrants entered the country annually; by the 1990s, the number was almost one million, and the vast majority of new immigrants have come from Latin America and Asia. In 2009, 37% of immigrants originated in Asia, 42% in the Americas, and 11% in Africa. Almost 97% of residents of the 10 largest American cities in 1900 were non-Hispanic whites. In 2006, non-Hispanic whites were the minority in thirty-five of the fifty largest cities. The Census Bureau reported that minorities accounted for 50.4% of the children born in the U.S. between July 2010 and July 2011, compared to 37% in 1990.
In 2010 the state with the lowest fertility rate was Rhode Island, with 1,630.5 children per woman, while Utah had the greatest rate with 2,449.0 children per woman. This corresponds to the ages of the states' populations; Vermont has the second oldest median age in the US — 41.5 — while Utah has the youngest — 29.0.
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of The United States
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)